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SEWilco writes "A businessman has challenged automated tickets of his vehicles by calculating the vehicle speed based upon the tickets, which include timestamps of two photos." Maybe more word problems should be on the police academy curriculum.

After decades of former governmental stability, in the 2000s the town made headlines repeatedly as two of its recent mayors were embroiled in clashes with the town council. One mayor, Joyce Beck was ousted from office after changes to the Town Charter. In June 2009 her successor, Myles Spires, has filed a $15 million dollar lawsuit against the town for malicious prosecution after being cleared of all charges initiated by the town for misuse of town's funds.

Consider things like paying for public works(plowing, winter damage repair to roads, etc), and other operating expenses; then $6 million is about right if it's a smaller town. Otherwise it could get higher than that.

My "wow" wasn't over the size of the budget, but of the percentage that was paid for by speeding tickets alone. I mean, what if nobody speeds some year, which is what you want anyways, right?

My "wow" wasn't over the size of the budget, but of the percentage that was paid for by speeding tickets alone. I mean, what if nobody speeds some year, which is what you want anyways, right?

Because speed limits and enforcement are about *safety*, not about *revenue*..... riiight. It's what they've always told me when I get pulled over for speeding. One time, I had even sped up to pass a guy more quickly, because I was being tailgated. Speeding a little bit permitted me to get out of the passing lane and let the unsafe driver pass me, but the cop still told me they were cracking down on speeding to "improve safety". Bullshit.

Even with your clarification, the GP is still right. Your options were to ignore him or to gently slow down. Increasing speed when you are "uncomfortable" is the wrong reaction.

What do either of those options accomplish? Ignoring him changes nothing at all, and "slowing down gently" stops up traffic in the left lane until such time as I fall behind any cars I've passed enough to slip back over into the right lane again, which is counterproductive, because I was in the left lane in order to pass in the first place. Speeding up slightly, on the other hand, allows me to let him pass much earlier (if, for example, I were going 1 mph faster than the car I was passing and accelerated

I think you're right.The best way to fight that is to pass a law requiring two pictures AND those photos must include distance markers and time stamps (to 0.01 second) so that people charged can challenge incorrect reading.

Speeding cameras are okay. But they need to be able to demonstrate their accuracy in each and every instance.

Maybe this should be a new requirement for speed cameras -- they can use the radar/lidar to get an instantaneous speed if they want to, but they can only generate a ticket if the average speed as calculated from 2 photos is above the speed limit and the photo has to be reviewed and the ticket approved by a trained police officer (i.e. not by the private company that earns revenue from the ticket). Since the photos can be a fraction of a second apart and still give enough detail for accurate speed calculatio

Those speed cameras don't have to use any radar/lidar at all. Just take pictures of cars as they pass at regular intervals, use image recognition to locate some centroid of each car in two frames, and issue a ticket if the distance exceeds a preset limit. You have a clear doumentation of the transgression right there. Heck, the time can be displayed on a separate digital display visible in the camera's field of view. Ideally supplied by another vendor. That'd be quite incontrovertible.

Yes, that would be possible. It is how the human-operated VASCAR system works.

But the systems being used are using radar because it can be automated. You can today buy a module which does radar speed calculations across multiple lanes on a roadway and gives back digital speed information. Eliminates all that photo comparison stuff.

Now the system in question here sounds like it is screwed up in some manner. As someone who has seen the little flashing things go off multiple times while driving I can certa

Radar is quite accurate, but it's more useful for a machine than a person.

But that's not a problem. The Cameras in Britain are radar triggered, but snap two photos. If the ticket is challenged, the photos are used as evidence. Markings are painted on the road with known spacings and the maths is quite simple.

The problem with speed calculations is that it depends on the assumption that your clock is precisely accurate, in much the same way that Radar depends on calibration. For a ticket to be issued, it should be necessary to have at least two corroborating pieces of evidence.

Ideally, a speeding ticket should require an actual human witness as well. Why? Because if speeding in an area doesn't present a high enough risk to be worth putting an officer out there to patrol it, one could reasonably argue that th

Yeah, but there's no need to do that (and how reliable will it be in cases like when a truck is overtaking a car - who's centroid is being measured?) - radar is cheap and it works in general for identifying speeders.

The photograph requirement would be a sanity check by making sure that citations are reviewed by a live human being (and a police officer) before being issued.

Making a real live police offer do the calculations to prove that the car was speeding should help reduce illegitimate tickets by addi

It becomes much more difficult for the officers to detect the speed of the vehicle if they do not have an accurate length of the vehicle. Mr. Foreman was able to go out and measure his vans in order to do the calculations - in order for the officers reviewing the traffic camera footage to visually determine the vehicles' speeds, they would have to have some other visual reference.

Not that any of this should be necessary. The radar guns in the speed traps can be calibrated to within 5 or so MPH. They just we

Actually, it's not hard at all. You just place two cameras fifty feet apart and measure the position of the leading edge in two photos taken a fraction of a second apart. You can then compute the speed fairly precisely, assuming you know the exact positions of the two cameras and the exact time delay.

I got a ticket from one of those things 2 weeks ago; when it flashed, I looked down. I was doing 48. I've checked my speedometer using a GPS, and it's accurage. They aren't supposed to take a picture until 10 miles over the limit (the limit there is 40, so it shouldn't have taken a picture until 50). The ticket that came in the mail said I was doing 52.

I talked to a lawyer, and was told to just pay the bill, less trouble and less expensive in the long run.. so, that was $218.

The real kicker on the ticket was that each offense must be reviewed by a real cop with a badge number. The cop's name? Officer Dollar.

I understand that speed limits are too low, but you're comlaining about getting a ticket for doing something illegal, because the exact extent to which you were violating the law was off by a fraction?
"I'm sorry your honor, I only stole $320 from the victim, not the alleged $350 you're going to have to let me off."

well some states have "reckless endangerment" set at a certain speed so yes, calibration should be a part of the system so it is accurate; especially if you are going to make money off of it... 4mph/48 --> 12% error, pretty bad.

that depends on if they're assessing a standard speeding fine, or something more signifigant. I agree that if there's a number the law specifies, your equipment should have a margin of error at least as large as its actual error. Given that the parent said they only got a fine, I'm guessing they did something technically illegal, then were offended when it was deemed technically illegal.

Heh... The thing is that there's law requirements for how the citations are issued. An LEO accurately measuring you being 8 over would be sufficient grounds for a ticket (if he so chose to issue one...). An automated system's typically got a threshold, specified in the laws, that they're not supposed to issue citations for- but the requirement is still for accurately measuring the speed (regardless if you're breaking the law...if they can't precisely prove you were doing it, it doesn't count as they do

but you're comlaining about getting a ticket for doing something illegal, because the exact extent to which you were violating the law was off by a fraction?

It seems like he's complaining about a policy/protocol violation by the police. Similar in nature (but not in magnitude) to coming home and finding your house ransacked by the police and then getting arrested for having a joint on your coffee table. If the machines aren't supposed to be clocking him and taking his picture and mailing him a ticket, it seems perfectly legitimate to complain about that when they do.

The machines aren't supposed to be taking his picture unless they measure a speed greater than 10 MPH over the limit; this is surely to ensure that they only catch people speeding, not to ensure that they only catch people going at least 10 MPH over the limit. The manufacturers (and police) know that those guns can be off by about +/- 5 MPH; that's why they set the camera threshold to double that. It seems to me that the system worked exactly as intended in this case.

No matter that there is probably not a person in existence who has ever driven a car for more than a few hours who has not broken a traffic law. I'd even go so far as to say that there is probably not a driver in existence who has not violated the speed limit somewhere at some time, even if only by accident. How is ticketing a random sample of drivers with fines that are in excess of two hundred dollars (after taxes, that is nearly an entire work week at minimum wage) fair enforcement?

The point is more that arguing that you were going 4 mph slower than you are accused of but still speeding can make worlds of difference.

In my example, if you were accused of doing 16mph over you would have been charged $310. If you were doing just 12mph over the limit you are still speeding, but the fine would only be $180. That's $130 less in fines and reckless speeding charges tend to carry heavier license penalties. 4 points on your license instead of 2 for example.

Having never received a speeding ticket, I can only speculate, but my understanding is that there are different infraction levels for speeding, and they work out to:

0-9 over x10-19 over y...

so, that difference is an entire infraction level different. This information I received from friends who are police officers. Now, the amount of difference I don't know, but my understanding is the 0-9 level is $50, so it isn't even worth the officer's time to actually issue a ticket, and I believe 10-19 is somewhere

I got one a few years ago that was bogus. It was the definitely the truck right in front of me, not me but it didn't matter. I tried to fight it but the appeals process was a joke--basically amounting to someone looking at the video and saying you are guilty. They didn't care to hear anything you had to say.

A lawyer advised me to simply ignore it. Don't pay it. It's a civil penalty not a criminal citation so they can't do anything more then send a debt collector after you. Eventually I did get a debt collection notice from an out of state law firm, and again following the original lawyers advice I replied with a letter stating that I believed the debt to be invalid and I asked them to send me proof of the debt in accordance with the Federal Debt Collection Procedure Act. As I understand it when you challenge the validity of a debt it is illegal for them to put a black mark on your credit record if you don't pay and they don't provide proof the debt is valid.

I never heard anything more about it. It's apparently not worth their time to follow up and "prove" the debt.

Surely the reason for the buffer is because there's te chance of an error in the measurement? In which case it was off by 4mph by your measurement, which is less than the buffer amount and hence perfectly fine since it won't flag anyone who isn't actually speeding.

I don't know about your GPS, but mine often has me moving 5 mph while sitting in a parked car. So I don't know how you check your speedometer with your GPS. How did you verify your GPS is a reliable measure to check against?

And I'd bet when you saw that flash your foot eased up on the accelerator. You could easily lose a mile or 2 per hour in the moment it takes to look down. And if the speedometer is a analogue, your reading could easily be off by a mile or

I know somebody who was successfully prosecuted (in the UK, ymmv) for doing 32mph in a 30 limit. The court took the view that the equipment was accurate enough to determine that they really were doing over 30, and over the limit is over the limit. I don't see you've got any grounds to complain about being caught at 48 in a 40 limit.

In order for it to be legal, an officer typically has to review the captured events before a citation is issued. The Police ARE involved and are partly responsible. Don't be calling people idiots next time if you don't have it right yourself, k? Diminishes the impact of what you have to say- and makes you look the part you're calling for someone else.

There have been studies that show a huge increase in collision, especially rear-end collisions at intersection cameras.There have been many scandals with towns setting their yellow lights to have durations significantly below the correct, and often legally required minimum times.

There is a huge trend for these to be cash cows for local governments by means of fraud. And they wonder why people hate them.

Looks like this guy has identified a town where the cameras are 'miscalibrated' and are raking in tons of dough from everyone that isn't as smart as this guy.

I live in Maryland, and had one of these go off when I was doing 5 under the speed limit. Also, this one happened to be on a four lane divided highway, what is to say which car is the one that triggers the camera?

There have been studies that show a huge increase in collision, especially rear-end collisions at intersection cameras.

There's a tradeoff involved with red-light cameras: they increase rear-end collisions, which have a low injury rate, but decrease T-bone collisions, which often result in major injury or death. Total collision rate at the intersection goes up, but the injury and death rate goes down.

Yes, but T-bone collisions really only occur when someone runs the red light a few seconds after the light turned red. Red light cameras are often set up to catch anyone who is even in the intersection as the light turns red, which would not cause a T-bone collision provided you were the only one in violation (someone jumping the gun and running the opposing red light could cause it). As is par for the course, a huge number of people who would not have caused an accident and likely missed the light by a f

Lengthening the time of the amber light decreases accidents without the trade-off.

Maybe where you live it does. Around here cars keep going into the intersection until the light has turned red and the last car routinely enters on red. I was down in Santa Fe, NM, not too long ago, where they have the longest yellow lights I've ever seen, on the highway between Santa Fe and Los Alamos, and I saw the same thing: four-second-long yellow lights, and cars careening through the intersection the whole time. Longer amber lights appear to do precisely nothing once people have gotten used to the

> There have been studies that show a huge increase in collision, especially rear-end collisions at intersection cameras.

The studies mostly showed that there was a slight increase of rear-end collisions at some intersections and a slight decrease of other types of collisions. Overall it was pretty much a wash statistically. I.e. no overall benefit (except to the revenue stream.)

The real travesty here is that the judge let other tickets issued by the same devices stand after it was demonstrated to him that they are not reliable. If there is reason to believe that the device was wrong in one case, there is reason to believe that it was wrong in every case.

It's entirely possible that the tickets that the judge let stand were for violators traveling considerably faster, or had evidence of braking in the photos (the photos were taken 50ft past the speed trap).

It doesn't matter. If the device that is used to measure the speed is questionable, then its speed determination for every vehicle is questionable. Once the device has been accepted as unreliable, you don't need further evidence of unreliability.

"In Prince George’s County, cameras are operated entirely by municipalities, which can set them up within half-mile school zones. The devices are installed by vendors that typically receive about 40 percent of the payout on each ticket, with the rest going to local, county and state government."

How could anyone have thought that this was a good idea? If the only thing the private corps are doing is the installation, why are they getting 40% of all future proceeds? If the private corps are doing the on-going process of operating and maintaining the cameras, then you just incentivized them to do whatever causes more tickets to be mailed out.

My guess is that it's the later, and the local municipalities are more than happy to incentivize the private corps to break the law, since they're getting 60% cuts. Then, when scandals like this one break out, they wash their hands of the matter and say we didn't know what was happening, it was that corrupt private contractor.

All tickets that pay into the agency issuing them are conflicts of interest. The idea that government agencies are above "revenue generation" has been decisively disproven by the real world.

My city (San Diego) installed red light cameras and then set yellow-times to the minimum. Safety? Heh. Accidents went significantly up as people were suddenly running reds. It was entirely a revenue grab.

Optotraffic representatives said the photos are not intended to capture the actual act of speeding, and are taken nearly 50 feet down the road from sensors as a way to prove the vehicle was on the road.

How does proving that a car was on the road prove that it was speeding?

The tickets from these cameras have no points (or you can fight to have the points dropped with this argument) the fine you should pass on to whoever was driving the car. You are ultimately responsible for any offenses that happen in your car, even if you aren't driving it.

That's a lame excuse from the company anyways. 50 feet is less than 1 second of distance traveled at even just 35mph so you'd have to be doing some unreasonable breaking to manage to trip the sensor AND get your picture taken without your break lights on. If someone actually is speeding enough to be ticketed, they should reasonably be expected to still be speeding less than second later.

It proves that your particular car was on the road at a given place and time. The radar sensor proves that there was a car-sized object on the road going faster than the speed limit. Together, the two prove that your car was going faster than the speed limit.

A lawyer with some spare cash can rent an instrumented "bait car" with certified-instruments that will be admissible in court and prove once and for all that the cameras lie, then sue the city on behalf of all who were convicted or who plead guilty under what amounts to duress.

I'm at work, so I can't look it up, but do a google/youtube search on "atlanta speed limit 55" or something like that.

TL;DR: Some college kids decided to go the speed limit on Atlanta's 295 loop, which is posted at 55mph, but traffic travels around 70+ mph. They got five cars and blocked all lanes, and went 55 mph. The video editing is atrocious, but the point is very good.

The government intentionally posts low speed limits so everyone is guilty. Once everyone is guilty, they are free to pull over anyone, at any time, for any reason, and cite "speeding" as the reason.

Once laws were published so citizens could read them, governments learned three things --

1) Make them vague, as specific laws are easiest to circumvent
2) Make them plentiful, as you never know when you might need one
3) Make them byzantine, as the government should be the only one who can decide what they really mean

This may seem diabolical, but it is merely the consequence of having to manage a large population of humans. One last rule -- if a law is truly wrong to the point of threatening the stability of the nation, change it and admit culpability but only after everyone who was affected by it has died, including those who enforced it.

Of course, this sounds silly, but then trying to get a third of a billion people to behave sounds silly, too.

You sure that wasn't in the DC area? I remember the story. They caused a HUGE traffic jam because the speed limits are impractically lowered. Another interesting point. Check out the Montana study on speed limits. It turns out that removing daytime speed limits actually *increases* safety.

If the time difference is 0.363 seconds, there's not much time for acceleration. Assuming braking at 1 g (approximately the maximum a car can do) that's a difference of about 8 mph -- which is substantial, but the pictures show the brake lights as generally being off, suggesting a much lower rate of acceleration or deceleration.

Also, it's clever to invoke Heisenberg any time we're talking about velocity and position, but I think these objects are large enough to assume that the unc

Further, assuming a 3/4 second reaction time, it takes 55 feet at 50mph for a driver to even get a foot on the brake pedal, which is 5 feet more than the manufacturer's expert claimed the average distance from sensor to photograph was. so, assuming the.363 second difference occurred after the driver realized the camera had taken his picture, he would actually not have the full.363 seconds to decelerate to meet the mean time theorem criteria for the photograph.

also if you had read the article you would have also noticed that the pictures are taken roughly 50ft after the car passes the speed sensors

according to google... 50 mph = 73.3333333 feet per second

so that gives the vehicle about an additional.68 seconds to decelerate before the first picture is even taken.

so assuming your calculations above are right that is roughly 15 mph of braking the car could do before the first photo is even taken....50mph-15mph=35 mph...which could put him at the speed limit before the first photo is taken.

this was just some quick estimation, but i think the calculations work out.

The photos were taken 0.363 seconds appart. Unless the trucks had their breaks completely locked up at the time the photos were taken there's no way they were doing the speed the cameras claimed. He has 40 tickets for his fleet of vehicles. If I were a business owner I'd get pretty suspicious if I got 40 tickets. Having a few speeders working for you is one thing... but 40 tickets? Come on.

The photos are taken 50 feet from the sensor according to the company.

But he is using time stamps which are placed in the image as they are being written to disk, (probably microsd card) NOT as they are being taken.Pictures taken are held in memory until they are processed (converted from raw to jpeg). At the time they are processed the timestamp in inserted into the image.

It took.363 seconds to process, timestamp, and write out the first image. That's is ALL that time stamp measures.

The photos are clearly intended to prove that the vehicle was at that place at that time. If the vehicle was not at that exact place at that exact time, they are inaccurate and should be inadmissible in court.

I don't think that's right. A time stamp on disk might be placed in the image as it gets written out, but that's only accurate with 1 second granularity anyway, making those time stamps useless. This is talking about a time stamp that contains much more precise time stamping information, likely burned into the (possibly non-digital) image by physical hardware in the camera, which almost certainly means that it is generated at the same time the picture is generated.

If it is being burned into the image after the fact, then the camera vendor is being dumb, particularly since the whole purpose of those photos is to prove that an infraction really occurred, and burning in the time stamps after the photo is taken is basically tampering with evidence.

which almost certainly means that it is generated at the same time the picture is generated

No. That's exactly my point. The time stamps are generated AFTER the picture is taken.

In order for the time stamps to measure EXACT time the picture is taken you need a realtime clock running in the focal plane.
NASA does this.

Off the shelf CCDs do not have this.

The time stamp is inserted at processing time. Its not in the raw image.

Lets imagine a system where an interrupt is triggered when the image capture is complete. If, at that time, the timestamp is inserted into the raw image, then it will be accurate to within one interrupt response time, which is going to be accurate enough to support the charge of speeding.

If the timestamp is inserted into the image after some arbitrarily long interval during which jpeg encoding is done, files are saved to flash memory, etc. etc. then you are doing it wrong and your cases deserve to be thr

The time stamp is taken from the compute clock when they are converted to JPG.

The interval between first conversion and second conversion was.363 seconds. That is ALL you can deduce from the time stamps.In that time period, the first picture is written to disk, (card) the second is converted and processed to the point of time stamp insertion, (but not yet written to disk).

No, they are saying he was able to decelerate 15 MPH in the ~50 foot distance between where his vehicle was when it was supposedly clocked, and where it was when its photo was snapped.You RTFA.

Optotraffic representatives said the photos are not intended to capture the actual act of speeding, and are taken nearly 50 feet down the road from sensors as a way to prove the vehicle was on the road.... “Their speed is not measured by the photos. The speed is measured before the photos are taken.”

Of course, that does bring up the question of why they need 2 photos if they aren't using them to determine the vehicle's speed.

Or, decellerating from 50 to 20 in.363 seconds, technically less as the article implies the brake lights are not lit in hte photo. Perhaps significantly less as standard incandescent lights as use in the brake light fixtures of typical trucks take a (relatively) significant amount of time to fully illuminate, and a (relatively) significant amount of time for the fillament to cool and go completely dim.

As was noted in the article, however (and in rebuttal to the vendor who argued your point), the defendant noted that none of the photos showed his vehicles (company vehicles) with their brake lights on.

While that doesn't mean they weren't speeding prior to the intersection, the calculations and absence of break lights raise reasonable doubt.

If the camera is not taking photos of the vehicles while the violation is being committed, what proof is there that the vehicle was actually breaking the law? They cou